Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Curse of Oak Island - An Expanded History Part II

(Blogger's Note: Early postings about this follow. The entire article is more than 12,000 words and should contain a good history of Oak Island.)

A New Company is Formed

Records show
that Pitbladdo and a man identified as Charles D. Archibald, on August 1, 1849,
applied to the lieutenant governor of the province for a license to dig for
treasure on Oak Island. They received the permission but it was limited to
unoccupied and ungranted lands. They then tried to buy all the land on Oak
Island owned by John Smith. That is, they tried to buy site of the Money Pit
after Pitbladdo had found and hidden something that convinced him there was
treasure hidden in the pit.

Pitbladdo never
reported to the Truro shareholders what he had found that day. His sudden
attempt to buy the land and dig for the treasure himself suggests that it was
something that convinced him of the great wealth hidden in the pit. Pitbladdo
is rumored to have died shortly after this. Or, it has been suggested that he
left the area and went on to other jobs as a mining engineer. There is a
reference to a James Pitblado who was supervisor of mining in Chester in 1875.
Some Oak Island accounts refer to a James Pitblado. Pitbladdo disappeared from
the Oak Island story shortly after his aborted attempt to buy the land and get
to the treasure for himself. The prospect of great wealth often corrupts a
great many people.

Still in
control of the Money Pit and with all the proper licenses and fees in order, the
Truro Company decided in 1850 to dig another shaft to the northwest of the
original Money Pit. They hoped, again, to tunnel to the treasure, or failing
that, to use the new shaft as a way of pumping the water from the Money Pit so
that they could get to the treasure. As before, they dug down just over a
hundred feet and then began to work their way toward the treasure. They reached
a point that was nearly under the Money Pit, or that they believed was under
it, when water burst through, sending the workers fleeing again. In a matter of
minutes the new shaft was filled with water just as all the others had been.

As planned,
they began pumping operations which succeeded in lowering the level of the
water slightly. It was obvious huge volumes of water were entering the pit and
that it had been designed that way. The two other shafts, dug through clay, had
been dry until they workers began attempts to tunnel into the Money Pit. The
water now in those shafts was coming directly from the Money Pit itself. The
water was not a natural spring, but some sort of booby trap that the original
three boys hadn’t tripped during their attempts to reach the treasure early on
because they had not dug deep enough.

The Booby-traps are Discovered

Someone finally
noticed that the level of the water in the Money Pit seemed to rise and fall
with the tide in the bay. Someone else noticed that a small stream of salt
water emptied into Smith's Cove at low tide. Searching, they found that the
beach there was not natural, but an artificial creation. Digging through the
sand, they found a layer of coconut fiber and eel grass that was protecting an
area of loose fitting stone. This, they believed was filling the Money Pit with
water. If they could block it, they could then pump out the water and reach the
treasure. It seemed simple enough.

Their plan was
to build a cofferdam out away from the beach. When that was completed, they
tore up the whole beach and discovered a network of drains. These were sloping
downward. They believed that all the drains emptied into a single shaft that
let the water flow into the Money Pit. If they could find that shaft and block
it, they would be able to stop the flow of water and to get at the treasure. They
began to destroy the drains one by one but before they completed their work an
Atlantic gale destroyed their cofferdam and much of their work.

The next plan
was to block the unground channel that lead into the Money Pit. About a hundred
feet from the beach of Smith's Cove, on a line with the Money Pit, they began
to dig, but when they reached a level of about seventy-five feet, they decided
they had miscalculated and missed the shaft. They moved twelve feet to the
south and began another attempt. At thirty-five feet they hit a large boulder
and as they tried to free it their new shaft was filled with water. They had
found the path of the water to the Money Pit. Or so they thought.

To block this
drain, they partially refilled their pit and drove wooden pilings through the
bottom to create a makeshift dam. Satisfied that they had blocked the water
flow, they returned to the pumps but still couldn't reduce the level of the water
significantly. It meant they had either failed to completely block the drain
from Smith's Cove, or there was another drain system hidden somewhere else that
they had failed to find. With that, they tried another shaft, digging down to
one hundred twelve feet before it flooded. Now they were out of time as the
summer ended and the weather was beginning to turn cold. Winter was coming. More
importantly, they were out of money.

In 1851 the
Truro Group tried to raise more money to begin another assault on the Money
Pit, but the investors refused to help. They'd already spent enough money, and
though evidence had been found that there was a treasure at the bottom of the
pit, or so they believed, they couldn't defeat the elaborate booby traps that
had been set by those who buried it. They just wouldn’t invest any more money
in what was really becoming a money pit.

Their efforts
had not been a complete waste. They had learned a great deal about the Money
Pit and its construction. The coconut husks and eel grass spread over the
drainage system were designed to prevent silting. Coconut resisted the effects
of the salt water, and had been used for hundreds of years as filtration in
ships to prevent water damage to cargos. They had also learned that the wooden
layers that had been broken were part of the booby trap. Had the boys and later
diggers, paralleled the Money Pit shaft and then dug in from the side, they
probably would have reached the treasure without tripping the booby traps.
However, they unwittingly broke the seals, allowing the sea water to flood the
pit. Notice that there was an easy way to retrieve the treasure if you happened
to know the trick.

This suggested
to them that whoever had built the Money Pit had a good engineering background.
The booby trap was ingeniously designed and apparently worked flawlessly. The
size of the operation, that is, creating the artificial beach, digging the
drainage system, and sealing it with the wooden "corks", meant the
treasure was extremely valuable. The labor that went into the creation of the
Money Pit indicated it was designed to protect that treasure from those who
hadn’t buried it.

Another Assault on the Money Pit

Nothing more happened
during the next eleven years. Smith eventually sold his property on the island,
including the Money Pit lot, to Anthony Graves. Apparently Graves found his
treasure by allowing others to dig for it on his property for a fee and a
percentage of any treasure recovered.

Next up was the
Oak Island Association who entered the game on April 3, 1861 with an expressed
purpose of excavating Oak Island to recover the hidden treasures. Some of those
who had participated in the old Truro Company were now members of the new
association proving that hope for some lasts forever.

They hired a
large labor force and gave them a job of reopening the pit. In the decade since
the last attempt to recover the treasure, the sides of the pit had collapsed.
They bailed out the water and dug down to the eighty-eight foot level. There
they ran into muddy clay and believing that it was blocking, or plugging the
water trap, they left it in place.

They moved to
the west about 18 feet and started to dig another shaft. When they reached down
118 feet, they began to tunnel toward the Money Pit. They created a tunnel four
feet high and three feet wide. They hoped to dig into the vault where the
treasure was hidden as it had been located by those earlier expeditions. To
that point, they had avoided problems with water.

They entered
the Money Pit below the platform at 105 feet that had been discovered by the
boring operation eleven years earlier. Then, according to Jotham McCully, they
"unwisely" dug through the Money Pit to the east. Water began to seep
into the pit again. Before long the new shaft was filled with water and even more
water was seeping into the Money Pit shaft. Three days of bailing failed to
reduce the water level. They had tripped the booby trap they had worked so hard
to avoid.

This time they
were determined to beat the water. A new bailing operation was begun using
dozens of men and horses and they succeeded in nearly draining all the water
from the pit. When they finished, they discovered the tunnel leading from their
new shaft to the Money Pit was choked with wet clay. Two men were sent down to
clear it. They had removed about half of the obstructing debris when they heard
a crash from inside the Money Pit. They had barely made it out of the new pit
when another rush of soupy mud poured in.

Other debris
was also found during this period. In the September 1861 Nova Scotian, one of the diggers, identified only as Patrick
reported, "…while the water was hindered by this earth from coming through
we took out part of the earth and wood. The wood was stained black with age; it
was cut, hewn, chamfered, sawn and bored, according to the purpose for which it
was needed. We also took out part of a keg." This material would later
provide clues about the actual age of the Money Pit.

Once some of
the mud between the west pit and the Money Pit had been cleared, both pits
began to flood again so bailing operations were resumed. McCully reported:

...on
clearing the tunnel again, another crash was heard in the Money Pit which [we]
supposed to be the upper platform falling and immediately the bottom of the
Money Pit to about 102 feet measuring from the level of the ground to the top.
It had been cleared out previously down to 88 feet. Immediately after, the
cribbing [walls] of the Money Pit commencing at the bottom, fell in plank after
plank until there was only about 30 feet of the upper cribbing. On Monday the
top fell in, leaving the old Money Pit a complete mass of ruins.

The platform
that had held the two treasure boxes found by the boring operation had
apparently fallen fourteen feet and now rested at the 119 foot level. The
digging operation had apparently tripped another of the ingenious booby traps.
It prevented the operation from recovering any of the treasure at that moment.

The First Recorded Death in the Money Pit

The Association
raised an additional two thousand dollars to purchase a steam powered pump.
Before they had made much progress, the boiler exploded, shutting down the
operation for the year. During
this accident, one man was apparently killed by the boiling water. None of the
members of the Association mention the fact, but in an essay written some seven
years later, E. H. Owen reported the death.

In 1862, the
Association returned to Oak Island and began the work all over again. They dug
another shaft near the Money Pit reaching down 107 feet. The Money Pit was then
cleaned and the sides re-cribbed to 103 feet. Water began to seep in and at 103
feet it began to flow at a rate faster than the pump could handle it.

But the major
problem was that the Association was now broke. They set out to raise
additional capital, but had little luck. The additional amount of money raised
was so small that it couldn't begin to pay to solve the problems that the
Association faced.

To stop the
flow of water from Smith's Cove, they wanted to build another cofferdam, but
lacked the money to do the job right. Instead they attempted to plug the drains
that had been found at low tide. This slowed the rate of water flowing into the
pit, but the plugs soon washed away and the flow returned to its original rate.

Work again
stopped as the Association attempted to raise more money. In August 1863,
operations resumed with workmen digging additional tunnels. More pumps were
brought in. In 1864, they found the source of the water on the eastern side of
the Money Pit. Rocks, about twice the size of a human head were forced out into
the pit. Having found that end of the
booby trap, inside the Money Pit, the workers were unable to plug it. Water
poured into the Money Pit and all the pumps they had were doing little to
reduce the water level.

The Association
was now completely out of money. To make matters worse, mining engineers,
concerned about the erosion caused by the constant flow of sea water, declared
the pit unsafe. That finished the Oak Island Association. Besides, winter was
coming.

This mentions two treasure chests that were found. From my reading it is not clear that anyone has ever found anything at Oak Island. The rock,the gold chain, the scrap of paper all appear to be nonexistent and unverified. There doesn't seem to be any real evidence that the whole thing isn't a complete fabrication. Can you point out the evidence or the new information?